MICHAEL MORRIS | Inclusion is a reasonable test of our humanity - Business Day

Michael Morris

Every October since 2023 I have steeled myself to devote a column to what can only be described as the extraordinary horror of, and following, October 7 of that year.

Many people I know often advise me with almost impressive simplicity: don’t go there. Most of them, I suspect, only want company on the margins as they are unwilling to “go there” themselves.

To be fair, the margin isn’t always the home of the timid. Nor, it should be said, is the centre. These days, striving to speak up for the interests of all people, whatever side events or history contrive to confine them to, will almost always be read as faintheartedness, an unwillingness to fight, or uncertainty about what you actually believe in.

Under the piece I wrote that was published on the Daily Friend website last week on what is an important test for the council of the University of Cape Town, I was berated in a vigorous exchange in the comments section for “continually try[ing] to bring reason into an unreasonable situation”, which, my anonymous critic felt “only hampers the attacked”.

I replied, in part: “I think it is our fate as humans always to try to be better… If we cannot try with reason to undo what is unreasonable, we are lost.”

Two things leapt to mind, neither having anything directly to do with the (more often than not) deeply unreasonable politics of the Middle East. The first could, I think, be called exalting; the second, shaming.

I will deal with the second first, the mob killing of an unnamed — as of last week — “immigrant man”, who, as GroundUp informs us in the spare register of trusted news reporting, “was beaten to death by a group of about 50 people in central Durban” last Thursday morning.

The context is stark in the observation of an anonymous security guard that “even South African shop owners had begun closing their doors, fearing they might be mistaken for immigrants”.

Some in our society insist that your outward identity really does distinguish you from everyone else ― your “nationality”, your “community”, your “culture” ― and that distinctions are paramount.

Which ― without having had to spell out the words “Netanyahu” or “Hamas” ― brings me to the century-old poem, which a conversation last week (in part about angels, believe it or not, and what may be the cosmic defiance of our urge to fly) prompted me to revisit.

It is William Butler Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, a moving tribute to his friend William Robert Gregory MC, an accomplished artist and cricketer and an Irish flying ace with the Royal Flying Corps until his death in Italy in early 1918.

The poem begins with the aviator foreseeing his fate, and acknowledging: “Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love.” And he gets to the nub of it in the penultimate stanza: “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, / A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

For as long as I can remember being interested enough to read poetry that “lonely impulse of delight” has remained one of the most potent symbols of what is at once distinctive and universal about being human and what is vital in planting your stake in the centre and declaring: we all are humans ― here we all stand.

Reason, the lodestone of the centre, always resists the logic of excluding by distinction. That is its power

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-10-26-michael-morris-inclusion-is-a-reasonable-test-of-our-humanity/